I graduated from the University of Washington in 2008 with a degree in Business Administration (Marketing), and immediately entered the professional online marketing world. I founded AudienceBloom in April 2010, and have since become a columnist for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Huffington Post. My personal blog is located at AudienceBloom.com/blog. I guest lecture for marketing classes at the University of Washington, and currently reside in Seattle, WA.

How to Find Your Company's Voice

Making your values and vision explicit For many entrepreneurs, launching a business is a values and vision-driven exercise. Whether you want to transform an industry with bold changes or simply make the world a better place, the way you tell your story is how you take the implicit and make it explicit. Your values and vision drive what you do: but it’s through storytelling that your message finds its connection to the right people.

As Musk says, “Your voice takes your inner life and makes it manifest: gives it shape and substance and meaning for others.”

For businesses, it’s about taking the DNA that drives your internal culture, builds your products and shapes your whole business and communicating that. How can your values and vision, conveyed through your voice, become what people envision when they hear your company name? How can it create an intangible sense of who you are and what you do, and create the intellectual and emotional reaction that they have when they interact with your business?

Four practical ways to find your company’s voice

Define your voice values: Circling back to the idea above, most entrepreneurs had a value or a vision in mind for their business when they launched. Whether the goal was to solve a specific problem or to become a hub of innovation, that speaks volumes. Ask yourself tough questions about what values are most important to your company and look at how that’s reflected in your voice. For example, if thought leadership is your most crucial value, you’re likely to convey that in a specific way. In another situation, your top value might be helpfulness or customer care. Each of these values strongly drives your communications toward a specific type of voice. The Voice Bureau offers a free assessmentthat helps you determine your company’s voice values.

Tag-line try ons: One of the most obvious places that your voice emerges is your company’s tagline. You can get a good indication of voice by what taglines resonate. If you’re looking for quick feedback from your marketing, doing a simple market research survey or a series of interviews on what tagline best represents your brand can give you a useful barometer. A number of market research services give you access to on-demand audiences that can give you answers in minutes.

A/B test it: We’re most familiar with the idea of A/B testing in the context of testing designs for conversion rates or headlines to see what drives clicks. But it’s also possible to A/B test for voice. The variable that you’re chasing is a bit more intangible, so it requires some thinking. But one strategy would be to send email marketing to test subjects in your prospect or customer pool and see which drives a higher level of engagement. Each email would represent a specific type of “voice” that you’re experimenting with. This could be reflected in your choice of headlines, copy, and subject matter. By measuring engagement, you’ll be able to determine a winning voice.

Write your real CEO letter: Every annual report begins with a letter from the CEO or the Chairman, reporting on the year’s highlights. But what if you wrote that letter – to your customers, your colleagues, your prospects – from a completely truthful place that explores what you want to say and how you want to help them? Write this without an intent to publish, so that it feels safe to be completely transparent. What emerges from that exercise may have to be massaged or reshaped, but could contain the seeds of your most authentic, powerful voice.

Conclusion

Finding your brand’s voice is an ongoing effort. But it’s necessary for building a strong brand, for connecting with your audience, and for having a successful content marketing campaign. What techniques have worked best for you in determining your company’s voice? Let me know in the comments below.

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